Dear Husband: by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oats is a masterful short story writer. Her latest collection of fourteen short stories entitled Dear Husband are all little drops of poison. Dark and horrific but never over the top, the stories are a pleasure to read.
In this book she focuses on the American family, bringing a sense of nightmarish reality to the short story that is not seen anywhere else.
In Special, the story of the Christian Zacharis family, the narrative is told by a fifth grade girl who lives in the shadow of her mysteriously retarded sister who has to wear a bright blue helmet to stop her smashing her head against the walls of their home.
Another noteworthy story Cutty Sark follows the life of Kit, a seventeen year old boy estranged from his media-whore mother and vacant neurosurgeon father.
At around 40 dollars the hardback copy is worth every penny.

Handling The Undead: by John Ajvide Lindqvist

When Horror Goes Horrible
by C.G Harry

At 25 dollars, with 375 pages ( 75 that could have been deleted) Handling The Undead, a supposed genre busting horror, is hardly worth the read.
From the get go the story, set in Stockholm, promises great things. Its charged with a peculiar electrical tension, a heat wave, quirky and dark ideas; power appliances that wont turn off, wide spread headaches and cannibal rats. Sounds okay but from here things only get worse. We are presented with some characters. There's Mahler, an obese journalist, Flora, the emo girl, and David, the not so funny comedian.
Then the dead rise and walk around with their telepathic radio brains, and the characters plotter around in circles, haunted by zombies that seem to do nothing but stink and decompose along with the plot.
One gets the feeling that Lindqvist could have spent more time working on this book. The beginning is good, but we kind of drift of into a la-la land by the middle that teeters out into a nothing ending, which left me asking what all the hype was about?
Something tells me publishers were quick to rush this one into print and cash in on the success of his debut novel Let The Right One In. The novel was critically acclaimed. This one in my humble opinion, should not have been published.
1 star 'I want my money back.'

Greetings and Welcome

I have been reading two books a week (104 books a year) and thinking about what went well in these books. I hope you enjoy the books and my thoughts.